When there’s no room left in hell, the dead will walk in every computer game on earth. If those words are true, and since I just wrote them on the internet they certainly are, then hell must be on the verge of overflowing. It’s a good thing that not all zombie games are alike, then, with Dead State, DayZ and Project Zomboid all evidence of interesting tales still to be told. Deadlight is a zombie game set in the eighties that looks and plays a bit like Another World. Our chums at Eurogamer had a grand time with the XBLA release and on October 25th it’ll be on Steam, with extra graphics and difficulty. PC people love graphics and difficulty. Peep at the trailer below.

I own the game on XBox, but I have to say it didn’t grab me as much as I had hoped. The main character is completely un-likable, and atmosphere is sorely lacking. The art direction is certainly nice, and there are some nice touches around control (whistling to attract zombies into traps, for example), but the experience ultimately devolves into jump puzzles and frustrating fights.

I played the 360 demo and thought it was alright, but I’ve heard that the full game gets samey fast. I’ll defenitely get the PC version when it shows up in a bundle though. Still looks very intriguing.

While the graphics aren’t 2D the movement is 2D. While his statement is slightly redundant saying 2D side-scroller, technically his statement could be interpreted in a correct way. Hope your comment made you feel better though.

In regards to the game, I am actually looking forward to picking this up. I can’t say I have played a side scroller zombie game. I love zombie games. I love platformers. Hoping this one is as fun as it seems like it could be. Some of the remarks about ‘meh’ controls are the only thing that might spoil the experience for me.

Both games are 2.5D, so it’s the same: 2D scrolling on a 3D environment. But I have to agree this game looks “Fresh”. In a different way Trine does. Trine is about how the graphics looks, the sum of the polygons creating a beautiful magical forest (compare Trine to Trine 2). Here’s is about the textures, creating ambience despite the polygon count.

i played this on XBLA… hoping that for PC they improved the controls. They just don’t have the response you expect for a game like this. No fluid movements, like Limbo, which was a shame because this game sounded great. It looks awesome, but the gameplay is just meh.

I would’ve loved to like it, but sadly it just didn’t work for me. The controls are inaccurate for no apparent reason, the writing was rather lackluster and the level design was unimpressive – until you meet a hobo whose underground labyrinth you have to pass. That’s the point where it becomes downright infuriating.

The game’s opening level is misleadingly fun. It makes you think “this is going to be a great game once it picks up and uses all of these things in more interesting ways”, then it throws platforming at you that requires, quite literally, millimeter precision, with anything other than perfection resulting in your death – and this is coming from a seasoned Megaman player. It unashamedly uses continuous trial and error instant-death “puzzles” to pad out very poorly designed levels, to the point where a lot of the time you’re never quite sure if you’re doing what the game wants you to.

If it’s $5 or less, I’d say pick it up for the opening level, and to see just how far a great idea for a game can be executed so damn poorly. But if you intend to buy the game for more than that, expect something along the lines of a very cheap and poorly designed Megaman game. You’re going to die a lot, and you’re going to get frustrated as you yell at the screen, begging the game to tell you what you should be doing.

If MS Game Studios are publishing then it will use GFWL I asked the devs via email but they never replied which is either ignorance or they do not want to confirm it for some reason………

I suspect it will just appear with GFWL attached if MS are involved. Its a decent enough game on 360 but after you put in 10 hours or so & got all achvs/collectibles your unlikely to ever play again which is why it sold so low on XBLA (not even 100K copies from 60m+ 360 owners!).

“As fleeting entertainment, Deadlight works, its flattening of a tired apocalyptic premise doing enough to make sure that it feels fresh. It’s a worthy successor to other 2D XBLA adventures, but in the end you can’t help feeling that this one could have done with a little more depth.”

Pity it wasn’t a beat’em up. Those old sideways scrolling beat’em up were heaps of fun. I hated games like Rolling Thunder and Shinobi. Pity game developers these days are so clueless about what fun is and so clueless about which games were successful and why. For a shoot’em up on a sideway’s scroller like this it need to be a lot more zoomed out or really really widescreen. Probably not going to make the graphics look to good though so its best not done and just make another shitty game.